ENS puts the switch to its v2 registry up for a vote

An executable draft posted to the ENS DAO forum by nick.eth would activate ENSv2 on Ethereum mainnet. It is the step that moves the Ethereum Name Service from the registry deployed in 2017 to a new design, and the only part of the transition that needs a DAO vote.

The motivation is architectural. The 2017 registry is a single flat mapping from a name's hash to its owner, resolver and time-to-live, and everything since — the permanent registrar, the NameWrapper, fuses, wildcard resolution — was layered on top. The draft calls the NameWrapper the most complex and least well understood part of ENS today. ENSv2 replaces the flat registry with a hierarchy: every name can have its own registry for subnames, owners can bring their own registry and resolver, and permissions become fine-grained roles instead of irreversible fuses.

What the vote does

In one atomic transaction, the DAO would:

• remove every remaining controller from the v1 BaseRegistrar, freezing new v1 .eth registrations;
• authorise a renew-only contract so unmigrated names stay renewable, and hand it ownership of the v1 BaseRegistrar;
• authorise a Graveyard contract that holds migrated v1 tokens and reclaims names once they expire past grace;
• point the v1 .eth resolver at the v2 resolver and the Universal Resolver at an intermediate proxy.

ENS Labs has already deployed the v2 contracts and reserved every active or in-grace v1 .eth name for its current owner. After the vote it commits to a final sync, opening v2 registrations, switching resolution to v2 and transferring every admin role it holds to the DAO timelock. The gap between the vote and v2 going live is expected to be a few hours, during which no new registrations are possible on either version; everything else keeps working on v1.

One detail owners should notice: v2 has a 28-day grace period rather than 90, although a name still lapses on the same date it would have on v1.